ARTICLES ABOUT WRONG DIRECTION BY DATE - PAGE 3

It's a driver's worst nightmare: a car headed the wrong direction, speeding right toward you. The frightening and sometimes deadly scenario has played out four times on Chicago-area expressways since mid-December, including twice since Friday. Four people were killed Monday morning when a driver made a U-turn on Interstate 80 and hit another car. On Friday, two people were injured when a driver went the wrong way on the Stevenson Expressway and collided with an oncoming vehicle.

Republicans are selling the same old fear and nonsense! They want you to believe that the country is going in the wrong direction and that the economy is failing. Unfortunately, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that after losing nearly 8 million jobs, before a single Obama policy took effect, we have now made meager gains for twenty straight months! Republicans want you to believe that all the jobs lost are Obama's fault! They are infuriated that he couldn't fix a mess that was 40 years in the making in a mere three years!

Unlike some of my right-wing friends, I actually believe in evolution. The shorthand for Darwin's Law is not "only the strong survive," as a moronic coach said to me in seventh grade in Sugar Land, Texas. If it were, we'd be ruled by T. rex. Instead, human beings - who are slow, small, weak and tasty - rule the world. Why? Because Darwin's theory predicts the survival of the "fittest," by which he meant the most adaptable. And Homo sapiens is incredibly adaptable. I take this detour into Bio 101 to make a political point about Mitt Romney - Politicus americanus - who obviously believes in evolution.

Name: Space Bag to Go What it is: A vacuum storage bag with Ziploc-type seal. The bag rolls up, forcing air out and creating a kind of luggage "brick" of your clothing, dramatically cutting down mass but obviously not weight. The bags come in numerous sizes; I used the medium roll-up, 131/2 by 191/2 inches, perfect for carry-ons. How it works: Insert your clothing, seal the bag, push down to force out most of the air, then start rolling from the sealed side toward the opposite side, which lets the air escape.

Retired Justice John Paul Stevens — Chicago native, Cubs fan and the third-longest serving justice of the U.S. Supreme Court — will speak at the University of Chicago on Monday in conjunction with the release of his book, "Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir. " On Wednesday, he talked to me by phone from his Supreme Court office in Washington about the book, the five chiefs he has known, his hometown and life in retirement. This is an edited version of our conversation. Q. Does coming to Chicago feel like coming home?

A witness cited in a police report of a wrong-way crash that killed a Pakistani immigrant and his daughter last month recalled Tuesday the horror of seeing a red Porsche turn against the traffic on Interstate Highway 88 and accelerate. Kathleen Lewis of Chicago said she saw the car pull in front of the vehicle she was riding in and slow down near the highway median. Lewis said other passengers in the car — her niece, brother and her niece's two children — saw the car turn into oncoming traffic and speed up. "We all screamed when we heard the impact," said Lewis.

When the Damen Avenue bridge opened in 1999, with tubular arches shooting over the Chicago River, I praised it as a creative synthesis of architecture and engineering, one that represented a bold departure from the neoclassical spans that fit the traditionalist taste of then-Mayor Richard Daley. The bright red paint on the arches was a bonus. It prevented them from getting lost in the sky and helped the bridge, north of the Kennedy Expressway at Diversey Parkway, become an urban symbol.

Cash was seen flying out the windows of a red Porsche on the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway shortly before the car headed in the wrong direction and collided with another car, killing two people, officials say. While witnesses have said the driver of the Porsche was throwing money out the window, state police would only say that "U.S. currency (was) emanating from the vehicle. " One of the witnesses, Danita Eisenbise, from Aurora, said she was traveling east on I-88 to visit her sister Saturday evening when she spotted a late-model red Porsche driving slowly near the Route 59 exit.

By Andrew L. Wang and Sam Unger and Chicago Tribune and WGN-TV | August 7, 2011

The text message came to her phone, and Afrose Merchant looked down. Merchant, her husband, her mother and her son were headed west in their car on the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway to an Islamic community center in Naperville Saturday evening. The message came from her sister Farzana Ali, who was a passenger in a separate car going to the same place. Before she looked up, Merchant heard a deafening collision to her left. She didn't realize it yet, but as her husband pulled their car to the right shoulder, the horrifying realization washed over her: the car carrying her sister, her father and her brother-in-law was the one in the crash, which police say was caused by a different car going the wrong direction on the highway.

An 82-year-old woman was cited with six traffic violations today in connection with an incident Friday evening in which the car she was driving down the wrong side of the Magnificent Mile struck and injured two pedestrians. The woman was given one citation each for driving left of center, driving over the median, negligent driving, disobeying a red light, and two citations for striking the pedestrians in a crosswalk, said Chicago Police Officer John Mirabelli. Mirabelli said it remained unclear why the woman was driving the wrong direction. The incident happened about 5:13 p.m. on the 200 block of North Michigan Avenue.